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Comment by tomhallett | Hacker News Reader

For Christmas, I bought my kids a physical set of encylopedias [1], usually $600, but black friday sale for $400. My son wanted to know "What are the top 30 soccer teams in the world cup all time?". Instead of googling it, which would have given him a listacle article with random facts and other clickbait, the encyclopedia had:

* Winners and runners up for the past 15 world cups * a break down of soccer per continent, comparing and contrasting them

He then went and totaled how many wins different countries have gotten....

For a family like mine which can afford $400 for a set of books, this has been an amazing purchase which is a far superior first step to "pull out an ipad and google it".

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0716601214

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I credit my entire software engineering career to the my ability to effectively use a search engine and find resources on the internet.

Nowadays Google is filled with ads and fake sites, but maybe a subscription to something like Kagi (https://kagi.com/) would be worthwhile?

Thanks for the recommendation about kagi - I'll check it out. :)

And for families who can't afford $400, library cards are free.

And for families without access to libraries, torrents are free

Totally agree. I try to take them to the library often, but (for families who can afford it) the convenience is nice because they can research something on their own without a trip to the library - at which point they probably would have lost interest. My goal is to tighten feedback loops for learning and discovery, without using a computer.

Questions they've answered which probably wouldn't have risen to the level of "let's go to the library today/tomorrow":

* what are the signs of the Chinese zodiac? which one am i?

* what is the different between a trademark and a copyright? why does it say "R" vs "TM"? (I gave an answer off the type of my head, but they clearly weren't happy with it.... haha)

> Winners and runners up for the past 15 world cups

The information your son has access to is outdated.

If the 2021 encyclopedia is outdated, so is almost every fact in my head about the broader world.

While I do agree that information in books can/will be out of date, I find the critique in this case funny because he was watched the world cup final game. So he knew who the winner/runner up was and added them to the bottom of his paper.

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